Five and a Possible

Abstract

Five and a Possible Alison C. Rollins (bio) Spades is a way of life for black folks.My mother went into laborIn the middle of a game.I was born as Five and a possible. She saidShe’d felt no greater pain than that loss,Than when she turned away, shamefacedIn the midst of kin, When certain bragging rights began to crown.They pulled my body from her diamond,Held me up to meet her gaze, to studyThe odds of what a luckless god had Given. An overbid could get you shotAt Grandma’s house, could have youQuestion the number of heartsYou had in your hand. Everyone knew that my mother was the score-Keeper. She counted the books twice everyRound. There had been three before me.Babies my mother got but did not get. My mother taught me to watch a man’s eyesWhen he deals, to cut the deckLike his cord of wishfulThinking. She’d warn in silence, don’t talk across the table!Then demonstrate over dinner with my father,As the air held the weight ofThings unsaid. After the divorce and Grandma’s funeral,All the words in my mother for tiredWere tired, her hands folded in scornLike cards. [End Page 140] Alison C. Rollins Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Copyright © 2018 Middlebury College Publications